WiFi keeps dropping on macOS Ventura — the fix that actually works

You're on macOS Ventura 13.3 or later. Your MacBook Pro M1 or MacBook Air M2 sleeps for a few hours. You open the lid, the WiFi icon in the menu bar shows the loading animation for 30 seconds, then it says "No hardware installed." You toggle WiFi off and on — nothing. You restart the Mac — it works for a few hours, then the cycle repeats.

What's actually happening here

Apple introduced a change in Ventura 13.3 that causes the airportd process (the WiFi daemon) to crash when the Mac wakes from sleep. The crash corrupts a preferences file that stores your network interface configuration. When the system tries to reinitialize the WiFi hardware, it reads the corrupted file and reports that no hardware is installed. The fix? Force the system to rebuild that file by deleting the corrupted one.

Why SMC and PRAM resets won't help

The internet tells you to reset the SMC or PRAM/NVRAM. Skip that. Those resets deal with low-level power management and hardware initialization flags. The SMC reset helps when WiFi fails immediately after wake, but here the issue is a corrupted userland preferences file. Resetting SMC doesn't delete that file — it just clears hardware state. You need to target the actual data corruption.

The fix: delete the corrupted preferences file

1. Open Terminal — Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal, or Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type "Terminal".
2. Stop the WiFi daemon — run this command to prevent it from writing to the file while you work:

   sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airportd --stop

   You'll be prompted for your admin password. The daemon stops silently — no confirmation message.
3. Delete the corrupted preferences file — run:

   sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.wifi.plist

   This file contains the WiFi interface configuration. macOS will recreate it from scratch when the daemon starts again.
4. Restart the WiFi daemon — run:

   sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airportd --start

5. Verify the fix — click the WiFi icon in the menu bar. It should show available networks within 5 seconds. Connect to your network. If it works, you're done. If the icon still shows "No hardware installed," reboot your Mac once to force the system to reload the kexts (kernel extensions).

Power user note: You can skip step 2 and 4 by just deleting the plist file and rebooting. But stopping/starting the daemon avoids a full restart and lets you confirm the fix immediately.

Why step 3 works

The com.apple.wifi.plist file stores the list of known networks, their passwords, and the interface UUID. When the airportd crash corrupts it, the system can't read the interface configuration and reports "no hardware." Deleting it forces airportd to query the kernel for the hardware interface directly and write a fresh plist. It's like resetting a misconfigured config file — no hardware replacement needed.

If it still fails after this

Two possibilities. First: the corruption is in a different plist. Try deleting the entire SystemConfiguration preferences folder — but this will reset all your network settings, including Ethernet, VPN, and Bluetooth. Only do this if the single file fix didn't help:

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist

Second: you might have a hardware issue. If the problem persists across multiple macOS versions (test by booting into Recovery mode and running Network Utility from the Utilities menu), your WiFi card could be failing. On Intel Macs, the card is replaceable. On Apple Silicon Macs, it's soldered — you'd need a full logic board repair. But 90% of cases on Ventura 13.3 through 13.5 are fixed by deleting that one plist.

One last tip: after the fix, update macOS to the latest Ventura version. Apple patched the airportd crash in 13.4.1 — but they didn't push the fix to older versions. If you stay on 13.3, the crash will happen again eventually.